This is an older post from Jim Nielsen on building user interfaces I came back to last week.

With software, the fact is that sometimes there are just too many variables to know and test and smooth out. So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters.

I feel this. I’m better at my job when I’m actually using something. Even better when I’m using something because I want to use it.

I’ve been building a side project on and off for a few months now. Having it my phone’s homescreen and actually using it every day gives me a different perspective on it than just building it and shipping it to others, like is often the case for client work.

Sand it, feel the grain, get a splinter, sand again, and repeat until smooth.

I wrote this post back in 2013 for HTML5 Hub, which later became the Intel Developer Zone. The site’s gone through many changes over the years and this post is no longer there, so I figured I’d repost it here instead. This is mostly unedited from the original posting, except for some extra headings and removing one dead link from the final section. The following should also show, for the record, that I used dashes before ChatGPT thought it was cool.

Using json_each and json_extract to get bulk inserts in SQLite with sqlc.

It’s not possible to stop the torrent of LLM-generated content, but how about this as a simple ask: when generating content, keep it short.

Some time ago the US government announced that they will de-classify UFO sightings material from the 50s and 60s. This caused quite the stir amongst conspiracy theorists but also plain sci-fi fans like me. They did, and – of course – the results were not that insightful. A few days ago the government also released […]